An Act of Terrorism

Introduction

A bag of skittles in one pocket and a twenty-ounce Arizona brand Ice Tea soft drink in the other was all police found on a 17-year-old Black male, whose body was found shot to death in a suburban-gated community in central Florida 3 years ago. His killer remained on the scene, confessing to the murder as an act of self-defense. Although the teen was unarmed, George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watchman in the Retreat at Twin Lakes subdivision, claimed the young Black male—without probable cause—attacked him. His broken nose and bloodied head were cited as proof of the altercation (CNN Wire Staff, 2012). Police emergency calls reported Zimmerman pursued the teen because he looked like a person of interest. In the moments that followed, the 911-dispatcher was heard urging Zimmerman to stand down, yet he continued to trail the teen. In the transcript below, Zimmerman describes the young Black male to 911 dispatcher:

This guy looks like he’s up to no good or he’s on drugs or something. It’s raining and he’s just walking around looking about . . . He looks Black . . . [911-dispatcher prompts question: What is he wearing?] . . . Yeah, a dark hoodie like a gray hoodie . . . Something’s wrong with him. Yep, he’s coming to check me out. He’s got something in his hands. I don’t know what his deal is . . . These assholes. They always get away. (Zehnder, 2012, para. 4)

What was it about the young man’s actions that raised suspicion? Zimmerman claimed the young man looked to be “up to no good . . . or on drugs or something,” because he was “just walking around looking about” (Zehnder, 2012, para. 5). In the 911 transcripts, Zimmerman does not comment on if the young man’s walk signified drug use. Could it have been his clothing that gave him probable cause to pursue the teen as a would-be criminal? Martin’s clothing was a costume of sorts quite typical of young Black urban youths, influenced by popular culture somewhere between hip-hop/pop swagger and gangsta-lean. And yet in the end, there was something about the Black teen that perplexed George Zimmerman into a state of abject fear and terror, sparking a vigilantly style deadly performance that perpetuated those series of unfortunate events leading to the untimely death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin.

George Zimmerman’s physical response in profiling the teen (after being advised not to engage and the resulting outcome) was a racialized performance situated in terror so powerful that it was enough to take the young man’s life. Whether known or unknown, he acquiesced to a cultural history of subjecting Black bodies to abuse; projecting racialized images of what he visualized was a threat. These projected images sparked a deadly performance, which saw Martin as a terrorist, and his inalienable right to stroll the subdivision of his stepmother’s housing complex as an act of terrorism.

In this article, I will discuss Harvey Young’s (2010) theory of phenomenal blackness and subsequently my own theory, performative (his)trocities, which describes how subjective perceptions of blackness can violently emerge into essentialist interpretations of knowing blackness. I have coined this theory to encompass both the word “history” and “atrocities” to describe the spontaneous historical reenactment of violent and deadly acts (i.e., lynching, witch burnings, racial profiling), which are based on social and cultural mistrust of the native body. ¹ By situating performative (his)trocities within the framework of phenomenal blackness, I will further illustrate how and why Trayvon Martin’s dark body was forced into visibility by an assumed knowledge of Black identity and thereby eradicated.

Finally, I will examine the role of “the hoodie” as the final evidence in knowing blackness. The hoodie carries an illicit and often threatening connotations on the bodies of Blacks than that of their White counterparts. When placed on a dark body, the hoodie becomes not only a weapon that suggests aggressive behavior but also a shield that in phenomenal blackness replaces Black subjugation with defensive antagonism. On Martin’s body, the hoodie represents the final piece of evidence that enacted Zimmerman’s performance of authority and control that was justified and validated as (mis)recognition. In examining perceptions and receptions of phenomenal blackness and performative (his)trocities, I hope to understand the preventability and the ultimate inevitability of Trayvon Martin’s plight on that rainy evening in February 2012.

(Mis)Recognizing The Black Body

Deborah Kapchan (1995) describes performances as the action of doing. Those patterns of behavior, ways of speaking, manners of bodily comportment—whose repetitions situate actors in time and space, structure individual and group identities. These structured identities are negotiated visually and based on the identifier/identified dynamic. If we accept Kapchan’s definition, blackness is a performative experience situated in societal beliefs and predicated on the assumed behavior of Black folks. It is not the same as Black identity; however, blackness has traditionally projected (mis)recognition onto the Black body. Harvey Young (2010) in Embodying Black Experience: Stillness, Critical Memory, and the Black Body, suggests that misperceptions of Black identity perpetuate the (mis)recognition of the dark body.

When popular connotations of blackness are mapped across or internalized within Black people, the result is the creation of The Black Body. This second body, an abstracted and imagined figure, shadows or doubles the real one. It is the Black body and not a particular, flesh-and-blood body that is the target of a racializing projection. (Young, 2010, p. 7)

In the 911 transcripts, George Zimmerman physically profile Trayvon Martin despite attempts by the dispatcher to dissuade him (Zehnder, 2012, para. 31). Zimmerman ascertained enough visual information about the youth to know he did not belong. According to Young (2010), “The black body is who we see from the outside perspective. It is the imagined and, yet, highly (mis)recognizable figure who shadows the actual, unseen body” (p. 10). Zimmerman lived out performative (his)trocities by spontaneously enacting his desire to protect the suburban-gated community from Martin as a (mis)recognized figure, and by merely being present in his Black skin, the autonomous outsider (Martin) received Zimmerman’s fearful and violent act resulting in his death.

Black iconicity and visuality play vital roles in the seeing and knowing of blackness in American public discourse. Nicole Fleetwood (2011) in Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness points to the ways images have traditionally provided a means at which (mis)recognition can be culturally justified:

Black iconicity serves as a site for Black audiences and the nation to gather around the seeing of blackness. However, in the focus on the singularity of the image, the complexity of Black lived experiences and discourses of race are effaced. The image functions as abstraction, as decontextualized evidence of a historical narrative that is constrained by normative public discourse. (p. 10)

Similarly to how the visual representation of the American flag symbolizes democracy (albeit subjectively), Americans are able to gather around and define the visual representation, as well as the various emotional responses the flag evokes. Black bodies can be conceived of in much the same way in terms of how we have been historically assimulated into White dominate culture in service to White hegemony. The conditions of phenomenal blackness made Martin’s physical body devoid of humanity. Martin became a shell for Zimmerman to project his (mis)recognized visual image upon.

In addition, visuality and Black iconicity have set up the conditions upon which phenomenal blackness and performative (his)trocities have interrogated and terrorized the Black community. In the instance of Trayvon Martin, was it possible that George Zimmerman associated the iconic image of what he thought was a safe young man with everything he believed was a violent Black man? While I cannot assume to know what Zimmerman’s intentions were, the 911 transcripts reveal a man in fear of what he visually perceived was a threat to the suburban community for which he felt obliged to keep safe. Zimmerman’s (mis)recognition of Trayvon Martin becomes not only the (mis)recognition of the visual image of blackness but can also be connected to how critical and cultural memory impacts the ways in which we come to recognize and understand blackness as a way of knowing the other.

Embodying The Black Body

The Martin tragedy calls into question the significance of critical memory. In phenomenal blackness ideas that have been physically projected across actual bodies continue to structure embodied Black experiences with each generation from the enslavement into the present (Young, 2010). Critical memory does not assume all Black folks have the same experiences, yet it seeks to identify similarities or shared experiences, which have profoundly shaped the creation of Black identity—a sort of “experiential overlap” or “ . . . the arrest and re-arrest felt by Black bodies beginning in the earliest days of the slave trade and lasting through the present moment” (Young, 2010, p. 18). This overlap is indicative of past practices that have over time altered the Black collective consciousness in terms of how African Americans negotiate and embody these perceptions or images of Black folks as “naturally aggressive” or Black pride as a representation of American homegrown terrorism in the United States. While I assert that these practices are present and have continued to afflict Black folks in terms of self-mistrust of the Black body, they have also facilitated the creation of Young’s (2010) concept of phenomenal blackness and also contributed to how the Black body is visually interpreted. I do not assume or even suggest that Trayvon Martin engaged in a self-inflicting mistrust of his dark body. Rather, his performance as “the young Black man on the street,” may have exhumed a past collective knowledge about the iconicity of the Black body.

Martin’s parents may have worked very hard to protect their 17-year-old from such images of lynching and other performative (his)trocities. He was a young Black man in the gated-subdivision. His unyieldingness in walking down the deserted sidewalk in the evening hours alone comments on his unawareness of the potential dangers associated with (mis)recognition. Yet, as these experiences have been culturally embodied, I believe Martin knew enough not to run while being physically pursued by Zimmerman. Harvey Young (2010) supports this notion by also implicating critical memory as the embodiment of experiences. Critical memory questions whether or not lived experiences are inclusive of a collective memory. For example, younger African Americans who have no recollection of or with specific memories, yet possess shared memories that identify connections across Black bodies (Young, 2010).

To counter Young (2010), I believe Martin’s dark body was evident and unavoidable when he encountered Zimmerman. Although he was armed with the cultural experiences of his ancestors, he may have lacked the performative recollection to survive the encounter with Zimmerman. Diana Taylor (2003) interprets this gaze as a communicative act between a primitive body and privileged spectator:

The “primitive” body as object reaffirms the cultural supremacy and authority of the viewing subject, the one who is free to come and go (while the native stays fixed in place and time), the one who sees, interprets, and records. The native is the show; the civilized observer [is] the privileged spectator. (p. 64)

Trayvon Martin should not have—nor possibly could have placated his blackness for Zimmerman as the “privileged spectator” into believing he was no threat to the volunteer watchman. Martin’s physical response to Zimmerman (by not running or pacifying the encounter) was an attempt at rejecting phenomenal blackness and refusing to be “the primitive.” Yet, he can no more reject his position as “the primitive” because he is the embodiment of a tradition that acknowledges phenomenal blackness and performative (his)trocities, in which the roles of the primitive and privileged spectator are performed.

The Eradication of The Black Body

Phenomenal blackness facilitates acts of terrorism to be propagated and enacted onto the dark body as a mechanism of controlling subjects. Similarly, the hoodie carries a distinctive racialized image that seeks to demonize Black folks when worn on the Black body, which played a pivotal role in Martin’s death. The hoodie has long been associated with visual images of the American working class. In the 1976 motion picture, Rocky, actor Sylvester Stallone proudly dons the hoodie as a symbol of struggle and solidarity of the White blue-collar working class. The iconic image of Rocky Balboa, the son of Italian immigrants, standing tall with his fist thrust proudly in the air is altered when we replace the Italian immigrant with a young Black man. This is especially ubiquitous when compared with the similar image below of a Black youth poised with fist held high sporting a rose and draped in a hoodie.

Michael Thomas Mills (2012), a semiotician at the University of Northern Colorado in an interview National Public Radio suggests that “hooded sweatshirts often suggest negative and damaging stereotypes . . . and are so prevalent in the media that many individuals . . . learn through the media to associate the clothing with a type of individual or situation” (as cited in Weeks, 2012, “Remember Rocky?”). With the onslaught of media influence, some perpetrated by Black media moguls looking to commercialize images of Black experiences, the hoodie has become associated with illicit connotations by the very nature of its association with Black identity.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Still of Sylvester Stallone in Rocky Balboa.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 2.

Rallies for Trayvon Martin.

In the aftermath of Trayvon Martin’s death, Fox News anchor Geraldo Rivera came under fire for implying that the hoodie was equally responsible for killing Martin as was Zimmerman (Castellanos, 2012). Rivera suggested that the real culprit was not the fact that Zimmerman (mis)recognized the teen, but that Zimmerman felt abject fear toward the teen because he was wearing a hoodie. Not only did Zimmerman feel fear in profiling Martin due to his out of place presence on the block, he also reacted to Martin’s blackness, which doubled as an act of terror in the gated community to which in Zimmerman’s self-appointed superior authority felt obligated to protect and serve.

I reject Rivera’s pleas to minorities asking them to engage in discretionary clothing to appease White hegemony and thereby reduce racial profiling. His comments only reinforce phenomenal blackness and continue to perpetuate performative (his)trocities by (a) demanding minorities acknowledge their second class citizenship status as the “Other” that must be manipulated and controlled at the discretion of a White body politic and (b) the assumption that if minorities do comply with self-discretionary measures of policing the ethnic body, issues of phenomenal blackness and performative (his)trocities will simply cease to exist. In the aftermath of the Trayvon Martin tragedy, the hoodie became a prop on the national stage to distract and vilify minorities from the horrors of performative (his)trocities and reinforce the ideology that Black folks are people in need of being policed. These assertions are short-sighted and only aid in the “American War on Terror” that posits national identity and whiteness as synonymous and interchangeable terms to enact authority over American minorities deemed “Other.”

Conclusion

Whether conscious or unconscious of his decision to profile Trayvon Martin in a desperate act of self-defense, George Zimmerman felt threatened enough by the presence of the unarmed teen to gun him down in the early evening hours of February 26, 2012. Zimmerman’s physical response in profiling the teen after being advised not to engage and the resulted outcome is indicative of a performance situated in fear and mistrust resulting in negatively ascribed images placed onto Black identity, creating an iconic image at which the violence and terror of performative (his)trocities in the eradication of the Black body may be enacted. Zimmerman acquiesced to a history of obsessions in popular cultural vilifying and subjecting Black bodies to abuse, distorting the essence of Black identity. Consequentially, critical and cultural memory as the embodiment of past experiences within cultures, dictates how both Zimmerman and Martin physically respond to the act of phenomenal blackness in regard to each other as a “primitive” and “privileged spectator.” In the role of privileged spectator, Zimmerman rejects his natal alliance as a minority and situates himself into conditions, which upholds and marginalizes others, resulting in the inevitability of policing the dark other as similarly as Jim Crow justice in the Post-Reconstruction states lynched and massacred millions of Black bodies.

In analyzing the intersection of critical and cultural memory, the hoodie is seen as an act of terrorism and used to justify popular connotations derived from the assumptions and stereotypes associated with Black identity. In looking back at Trayvon Martin’s last few moments, I am struck by the sheer preventability and ultimate inevitability of his murder. Phenomenal blackness is conditioned on the assumptions and willingness for others to negotiate Black identity. Although George Zimmerman positioned himself as a self-proclaimed protector of his neighborhood, he did very little to protect the one person who needed him the most. Instead, Martin’s dark body was the anomaly. There was no innocent youth of a 17-year-old child, but a manifestation of fear and terror that threaten the welfare of the “innocent” citizens on the block—all of whom stood as audience to the (his)trocity behind their locked doors, witnessing as Martin begged for his life that rainy February evening.

I feel pity and an uneasy familiarity of what I believed was an isolated incident in central Florida that in actuality is a recognizable trend shadowing Black culture since the institution of slavery in America. In the aftermath of the Martin tragedy, celebrity pop culture icons inadvertently rejected the preventability of performative (his)trocities by calling attention to the hoodie as a performance of resistance and protest, rather than addressing the real culprit in trying to understand why issues of phenomenal blackness have plagued the Black body as a familiar face of national terrorism. Celebrities like Mark Zuckerberg, Selena Gomez, and Rihanna proudly adorned the hoodie as a symbol of protest while demonstration marches filled the streets of major cities. Americans everywhere proudly proclaimed, “I am Trayvon” in call and response. Skittles and Arizona brand iced tea beverages prevailed in distracting us from the real issues of performative (his)trocities. The slogan attempted to create a shared experience and was seen as a universal object that crossed racial and class boundaries.

I participated in a student-organized rally held at my institution. Even as I walked (hoodie in tow) with those who, much like myself, have never experienced performative (his)trocities, I discovered that we all share similarities with Trayvon. We are all ill-equipped to face the ongoing war waged against the dark body. On the day the verdict was announced and George Zimmerman was set free, I was again reminded of how performative (his)trocities and phenomenal blackness, in light of a national (mis)recognition of Black identity, is just as unavoidable of a circumstance as being hit by a stray bullet in the inner-city or gunned down outside a suburban subdivision in central Florida. We are not safe. Every one of us is a suspect. And we are all Trayvon. We are Trayvon.